The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one
asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathise. The
answer is inevitable: with the victor. […] Whoever has emerged
victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in
which the present rulers step over those who are lying
prostrate.

In a recent essay Hito Steyerl extends Walter Benjamin’s
critique of triumphalism inthe narrating of history to the
production of documentary images. She emphasises the dubious nature
of the documentary genre’s conventional claim to objectivity and
historical verisimilitude, even when exercised in a purportedly
critical manner — that is, when providing visibility or giving a
voice to those who wouldn’t otherwise have it, or when registering
the process and/or results of the kind of socially engaged,
collaborative work that has become a staple of post-studio art
practice since the early 1990s.2
The photographs and films of Phil Collins can, of course, be
connected to this gesture with their expansive repertoire of
portraits of people who may be seen as victims of particular
historical circumstances. But no matter how engaging these images
are and what they promise to reveal to us, the viewers, about their
subjects — and indeed, about ourselves — ultimately they function
as what Claire Bishop and Francesco Manacorda have called ‘residual
traces of a larger aesthetic and conceptual scheme’.3 Typically staged in sites of
geopolitical conflict, Collins’s work systematically extracts its
subjects from the determining factors that bear down so heavily on
their identities as

In the mid-1970s, the ‘socialist personality’ was defined as
‘…an all-round, well developed personality, who […] possesses a
firm class outlook rooted in the Marxist-Leninist worldview […] is
thoroughly imbued with collective thoughts and deeds, and actively,
consciously and creatively contributes to
the shaping of socialism’. Wörterbuch zur sozialistischen
Jugendpolitik, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1975,
p.249. Cited in Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German
Society from Hitler to Honecker,
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, p.70.↑

See John Rodden, Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse: A
History of Eastern German Education,1945—1995, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2002, pp.175—217.↑

Heinz Hasenkrüger, ‘Einige kritische Bemerkungen zur Sportschau
1956’, Theorie und Praxis der
Körperkultur, vol.5, December 1956, p.962. Cited in Molly Wilkinson
Johnson, Training Socialist Citizens:Sports and the State in East Germany, Leiden and Boston:
Brill, 2008, p.143. According to Johnson:
‘These synchronised exercises were the most politically significant
feature of the Gymnastics and
Sports Festival as rituals of state. Designed to represent the key
values of collectivity, discipline,
and order, they received the most careful attention.’↑

Journal

Maeve Connolly identifies artists’ cinemas as a new form of
contemporary public art, demonstrating how artists make explicit
the importance of desire, fantasy and projection in the ongoing
production of the public sphere.